Tragic Sense of Life | Page 8

was it then that a black cloud from heaven Such blackness gave to
your Nazarene's hair, As of a languid willow o'er the river Brooding in
moonless night? Is it the shadow Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the
Angel Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling-- Bottom he ne'er can
touch--whose grief eternal He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason?
Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled --A cloud as black as
the black wings of Luzbel-- While Love shines naked within Thy naked
breast?
The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level
throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still
remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most
sustained lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample
beauty and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old
Testament style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a
group with Paradise Lost and The Excursion, but in a tone halfway
between the two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and
substantial poet that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency
towards grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted
previous similar efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain
monotony due to the interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an
artist: the absolute surrender to one dominant thought and a certain
deficiency of form bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose
sequence of meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested
by images or advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His
human body: Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each
meditation is treated in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful
texture, the splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the
inner vigour of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest

facts are interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this
blank verse becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a
too insistent mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line
accented on its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the
whole.
Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine
inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency in
form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves to
the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the
movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His
_Rosario de Sonetos Líricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the
finest sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this
volume--more at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on
events of local politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic
side of Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that
sonnet xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_;
from a suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for
knowledge is "not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose
"thought is therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered
moonlight love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself,
which of course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated
under many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which
truly do justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it
contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that
sombre and fateful poem Nihil Novum sub Sole (cxxiii.), which defeats
its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration.
So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the question
of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably the
Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at all,
to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their
source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and
over-refined artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal,
the sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable
variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems

old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too
genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of
Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to
intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of this
art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it adds to
the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is indeed
more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true poetic
note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in strength.
He is not refined: he is final.
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